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Brittney Griner, Basketball Star, Helps Redefine Beauty

TALLER than 99.35 percent of all Americans, the basketball player Brittney Griner has the wingspan of an albatross, wears sneakers more than twice as large as the average woman’s foot and, more saliently, perhaps, can dunk. It was the latter fact that turned her into a YouTube phenomenon when she first appeared on the scene a few years ago as a high school phenomenon in Houston.

This week Ms. Griner, a 19-year-old Baylor University freshman, was in the news again as her team played in the N.C.A.A. Division I women’s Final Four in San Antonio. (Baylor lost to Connecticut on Sunday night in the semifinals.)

That will hardly come as news to SportsCenter fans. Yet the widening visibility and fame of Ms. Griner, who is 6-foot-8, is also likely to make inroads on aspects of the culture where you’d have a hard time finding people who can tell a zone defense from a full-court press.

Feminine beauty ideals have shifted with amazing velocity over the last several decades, in no realm more starkly than sports. Muscular athleticism of a sort that once raised eyebrows is now commonplace. Partly this can be credited to the presence on the sports scene of Amazonian wonders like the Williams sisters, statuesque goddesses like Maria Sharapova, Misty May Treanor and Kerri Walsh, sinewy running machines like Paula Radcliffe or thick-thighed soccer dynamos like Mia Hamm.

As these women and their sisters took home trophies and stockpiled medals, they also helped reset the parameters for how feminine beauty is defined. It has been a century since women athletes were first released from chaste and restricting sports “costumes” and began flaunting their athleticism and muscularity. A lot happened in that time, not least the political awakening that provoked shifts in both consciousness and standards of what it meant to be a woman and play like a man.

“Brittney Griner is such an athlete, and so gifted, you almost don’t notice that she is part of a slowly unfolding, civilized response in this country to the slightly androgynous female,” said Terry Castle, the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and a passionate fan of women’s basketball. “She calls our attention to the unnecessary rigidity of sex roles and makes a number of feminist points along the way.”

Over the last three decades, Dr. Castle added, “There’s been increased visual and possibly social tolerance, especially in the realm of women’s sports, of individuals who could reasonably be called androgynous.”

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Ms. Griner during a news conference at the N.C.A.A. Memphis Regional college basketball tournament in late March.Credit
Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

That Ms. Griner falls into such a category can be inferred from the volume of inane Web chatter dedicated to such burning issues as “Is Brittney Griner a lesbian?” or “Is Brittney Griner a man?”

These questions are not nearly as relevant, said Holly Sweet, a director of the Cambridge Center for Gender Relations, and who also teaches at M.I.T., “as shifts in our relationship to what it means to be aggressive, competitive, muscular and a woman.” It is not, Dr. Sweet added, “so much a question of gender anymore as what we find sexy and beautiful.”

With her attenuated Gumby torso, coltish legs and tomboy features, the still growing Ms. Griner falls well outside familiar beauty standards. Yet for some in the image business — fashion stylists, model casting agents and editors — that is a large part of her potential appeal.

“I try never to work with just the type of person who’d be attractive to me,” said Katie Grand, the influential stylist and editor of Love magazine. “If you look at art through the ages,” Ms. Grand added, “some will always prefer a more straightforward beauty and others something untraditional.”

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Brittney Griner of Baylor is set apart by her height, 6 foot 8 inches, and her athleticism. Credit
Ben Margot/Associated Press

A woman of Ms. Griner’s appearance might be, Ms. Grand said, “fantastic to work with, since I try to work always with people who are interesting on a lot of levels,” and not merely those with model-pretty looks.

Before Googling Ms. Griner’s most recent spate of off-court pictures, said James Scully, a model casting agent whose clients have included Gucci and Stella McCartney, he knew her only as this “slightly gender-ambiguous athlete who reads either as a pretty hot boy or a trans-girl, and not particularly a person who falls into the realm of how people see beautiful.”

Then he came across a picture of Ms. Griner without her baggy basketball shorts and jersey and realized, he said, “She’s a conventionally pretty girl,” albeit one who towers over most of her teammates, coaches and fans.

For Paul Rowland, a renowned model scout who recently defected from Women, the agency he formed some decades ago, for Ford Models, the notion that women like Ms. Griner can be found beautiful is less a function of shifting tastes than of the culture finally catching up with early adopters like himself.

“I always love one-offs and amazing creatures,” said Mr. Rowland, who immediately after this reporter called busied himself combing the Web for recent photographs of Ms. Griner. “Maybe I should represent her?” Mr. Rowland said. “Why not? I can imagine a market for that.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2010, on Page E8 of the New York edition with the headline: This Basketball Story Is a Beauty. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe